


not a cry that you hear at night

by hugebitch



Category: The Dresden Files - Jim Butcher
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-02
Updated: 2017-05-02
Packaged: 2018-10-27 00:33:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10798017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hugebitch/pseuds/hugebitch
Summary: After Skin Game, Deirdre reconnects with her human nature.





	not a cry that you hear at night

**Author's Note:**

> More notes at the bottom, but first and most importantly, I can’t give enough thanks to Patrick_Diomedes and Kamaria (donnatrcy on tumblr) for their invaluable commentary. The title of this is lifted from Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah".

The halls of Hades were blank and empty, and Deirdre was left to wander them alone. The last face she had seen had been her father’s--she’d been blindfolded for her trial. Trying to argue her case when her judges had been invisible to her was a nigh-impossible task, and she knew her failure had resulted in her imprisonment here. She shivered against the bitingly cold air as she walked, shoulders hunched and head low. Her bare feet were silent against the harsh white stone floor, but that didn’t matter.

There was nowhere to hide. She had fought alongside Anduriel for over a millennia, but now, when she needed the shadows the most, there were none to protect her--there was only relentless light ensuring that the monsters would find her again.

Her mother had turned up her nose at the majority of her own history’s heroes, and Deirdre had been raised on a diet of stories from Anduriel’s and Imariel’s pasts, on the Order’s exploits, and--most importantly, now--on the Greek legends that Tessa had grown up immersed in. She’d known for centuries about the Medusa that she had so frequently been mistaken for, the Minotaur that she now felt she was becoming, and the Erinyes, the avengers of murder and indignity alike. It was them that hunted her now, screeching at her and lashing out with whips and claws.

And there was one of them now, up ahead. Automatically every muscle in Deirdre’s legs tensed and she turned to flee. She had a good head start. She might get away this time. And if nothing else, she was quick. No longer silent, her feet smacked against the stone as she sprinted headfirst into the corridor that she’d just come out of.

This was just like every other time one of them appeared in front of her--she ran, they chased.

Only now her legs wouldn’t work. Her left foot hit the ground, but her right leg didn’t go out. A buzzing had manifested in her bones, and she found herself suspended mid-stride. She tried to look around for the source of this unnatural torment, but her eyes wouldn’t turn. Her fingers wouldn’t twitch.

Nothing.

Worked.

The world went completely, utterly black.

And then the brightness returned, this time with a soft blue tinge. Deirdre fell to her knees and only just caught herself before her face hit the ground. Shuddering from cold and disgust, she coughed and coughed until her lungs ached. Finally she wiped her nose with the back of her hand and turned to face the being that had confronted her.

The Archangel Uriel had taken on a disquietingly familiar guise. There was Cassius’s hairline and cheekbones, McKullen’s lean build, and even the traitor’s broad-knuckled hands. But by far the most disturbing part was the eyes. They mirrored her father’s exactly, but the way Uriel looked at her with them made her want to throw up. Her father would never feel such disgusting condescending _pity_ for her. Bile rose in Deirdre’s throat and she looked away.

Uriel didn’t try very hard to get her attention. “Deirdre,” it said. It was her father’s voice, but void of the accents he’d picked up over the centuries. The double whammy of familiarity and dissonance had Deirdre’s hair standing on the back of her neck.

“What,” she said flatly.

Uriel’s eyes became even more pitying, if that were possible. “You know your father cannot rescue you from this place,” it said. “Are you not cold, and afraid?”

She was.

She really was.

“Shut up,” she said, without any real bite to it. She dragged her gaze away from the ground to meet those eyes again. Still not her father’s. But maybe if she pretended--

And then Uriel’s face softened again. Deirdre’s lips pulled back from her teeth in a horrified sneer. “Look at you,” the angel said. “Fallen so far from your original station.”

She had fallen. Her strong scales didn’t cover her anymore. Her hair, once sleek and glossy, now hung in lank strands down her back. Her fingers that had once ended in claws were now dull, and her teeth were flat and useless. She was, in a word, human.

It was enough to drive anybody mad.

“You did not choose this,” the angel said gently. “Not fully. Daughter of Nicodemus and Tessa, you were raised from birth to become a weapon. You never were given the ability to understand, to empathize… do you even know how many you slaughtered for your father’s sake?”

Was that a serious question? How was she supposed to remember how many people she’d killed? “Um… a lot.”

Uriel gave her a look that was equal parts disgust and pity. “Like a child, you know not what you do.”

“I did, actually,” Deirdre said. “See, first we tied them down and tortured them a bit--”

“Enough,” Uriel said. It had the force of a command, and little streaks of lightning danced through the air. “You were groomed from a young age to become--”

The second that stupid fucking cherub opened its mouth Deirdre could feel her blood boiling. And here, without her father to give her a look that meant _calm down, sweetheart, you’re better than this_ , the words came flying out of her mouth without a second thought. “I was groomed?” she demanded. “I was? At least I wasn’t fresh-minted to serve my holier-than-thou Daddy at the cost of all else!”

“You dare--”

Deirdre kept going. The electricity in the air was growing stronger, and she had the feeling that very soon she’d be getting hit with some of it. So what if she was? It was either the slow slide into madness, the short drop into oblivion, or this. She’d take the choice that she wanted, the way she always had. “Everything I’ve done,” she said very deliberately, “I’ve done of my own accord. And I know that and you know that because none of you were able to intervene. My father raised me according to his moral code--can you say the same for yours?” The angel was taller than her but she had no problem meeting its gaze. Not even its cloned eyes could unsettle her enough to throw her off the narrow path of her anger. “You’re so omnipotent, you know when I took up my Coin. You know exactly what my Fallen has said to me, and you know that I agreed with it of my own free will. You know what my parents and I do.” At this, Uriel’s face contorted in disgust. Deirdre gave it a sarcastic smile. “Would you like to give some speech about human innovation? I’m sure I can come up with a few examples for it. There are things we did that even our Fallen didn’t imagine possible.”

“Was it worth it?” Uriel asked. “You know what fate awaits you down here.”

This cut Deirdre short. “I do,” she admitted. An eternity of torture wasn’t the best for anybody’s sanity, and she didn’t want to know what affect madness would have on her now that she was entirely soul. Sometimes, to distract herself from her fate, she’d bring up little snippets of memories. She had fifteen centuries worth of memories. She could prolong the inevitable like that, with candles. The memory she was playing through now had a thousand cousins with only minor differences. She’d been falling asleep by degrees with her head on her father’s chest, and he’d been running his fingers through her hair.

She brought it up now, schooling her face into a mask of indifference as she replayed it. She made sure to get the specifics right. She didn’t want to burn through memories like that stupid little match-girl from the fairy stories. No esoteric heaven awaited her when she did. So she concentrated on the little details--it had been in the afternoon. Sunlight had been streaming in. They had been…

They had been…

They had been on a train! That was right, they had been on a train back when such things were innovations. She had been tired because she’d spent all night running around trying to attract the Knights’ attentions, to keep them away from her father as he worked. It had worked, and now she was exhausted, and when her father had wrapped his arm around her she’d leaned into him, murmured something about waking her if he needed her, and nodded off by degrees. He’d been wearing a jacket that had been soft against her cheek, and she’d felt the gentle thump of his heart, breathed in the inoffensive clean scent of the cologne he had on. She focused on his hand in her hair last, because that was the most essential detail and needed the least effort to remember. It was the simple, repetitive motion, the sense of being close to the man she loved more than anything in the world, of slowly sliding toward sleep.

Uriel had been talking and its voice had been an annoying background noise, but it faded into a watchful sort of silence.

“What,” Deirdre said, and saw it staring at her. She looked down at herself. The memory she had called up was playing across her chest like a picture across a screen, and Uriel was watching it intently. Deirdre had never been one for caring about who saw her naked, but now she felt exposed and bare in a totally new way. She folded her arms across her chest. “That’s private,” she snapped. “Mind your own business.”

“He loves you,” Uriel said gently. “We had hoped that would save him.” It didn’t look away from her chest.

“Maybe you should have taken into account the fact that I’m not a magic box for him to put emotions into so salvation comes out,” Deirdre said. “Maybe your pencil-pushers up on Cloud Nine or whatever should have remembered that I am not his property. I was his partner, and the affection I had for him was just as conditional as what he had for me.”

“You are his daughter and--”

“That sentence better end with _and a person who can make her own choices_ , or I’m walking away. At least the Erinyes don’t moralize.”

“I am an angel,” Uriel said. A hint of humor had crept into its tone. “Moralizing is part of the job.” It reached out to her again, and halfway through extending its arm it changed, and there was her father, exactly, holding out a hand. “Ask for forgiveness, child. It will be granted, if your heart is true. The Almighty has carried souls out of heathen dens before, yours is not such a great burden that He cannot bear it.”

There was nothing that she wanted more than to put her hand in her father’s, and hear him tell her that things would be alright. She was cold, and tired, and she hurt all over--both the ache of pain from torturous conditions and the simpler ache of loneliness. But… this was not her father. And for her to betray her father’s cause…

Who was she, if not the sum of what she fought for? Who was she if she wasn’t somebody who loved what she did with all her heart, and all her soul, and all her might?

Deirdre’s throat closed up. The cold halls of Death had never seemed more overwhelming, nor had the wounds the Erinyes inflicted on her more painful. What made it worse was the knowledge that if she’d had even a fraction of her former power she would have laughed in Uriel’s face. How pathetic she was now, how weak, how disgustingly and utterly human. “I--”

“You deserve a kinder fate than madness and oblivion, child,” Uriel said. “Face your sins and repent. Let me help you. Please.”

Tears were clouding her vision. Through them she could almost see the Heaven that her dear companion had left behind, all marble and gold and impossible geometry, full of smiling faces, free from pain, from fear, from abandonment. “I-- I--”

“Pray with me. Look into your heart and find the bit of you that wants to be forgiven.”

Deirdre closed her eyes and pushed out everything. Every clash of her blades with those of the Swords, every sweet whisper from her companion, every hot drop of blood she’d tasted. It wasn’t easy to try to shut out fifteen centuries of devotion, trust, and loyalty, but she did her best. She chased away the words the Knights had said and the warm crush of her mother’s arms around her and the sound her hair would make when it sparked against stone, pushed past Rosanna’s laughs and Cassius’s scowls and the way her parents would give each other appreciative glances when they thought they could get away with it. Every doubt and every achievement, every kill and every bitter defeat. She reached down deep into the core of herself and found…

One thing. One tiny truth that she couldn’t fight away. “I am my father’s and my father is mine,” she said. The words hung in the empty air.

Uriel’s voice was hushed. “That’s your decision?”

A shuddering breath left Deirdre. “Yeah.” She opened her eyes and let the tears fall. They coursed down her face, neither hot with shame nor cold with fear. They were just there. “Fuck off, Uri.”

The diminutive angered the angel more than the swearing, and its response was delivered harshly but in a completely calm tone of voice. “You know, your father bragged about killing you without struggle from Michael Carpenter. Gloated about it, even.”

It hurt her to think of it, but in a perverse sort of way she was glad. “Carpenter’s a shit,” she said. “Who _wouldn’t_ brag?” Still, a sliver of doubt had wedged itself into her heart. It hurt more than the knife had. Unless… wait. She blinked. “ _That’s_ your idea of a plan? To hurt me and let them hurt me until I beg your Daddy to make it stop?”

“Could you stop calling Him that?”

“Are you just going to hang around here, pestering me and watching me break? Do you really care about me beyond my potential to be saved?”

Uriel blinked. “What are you beyond your potential to be saved?” It sounded genuinely confused. “That is the greatest achievement a soul can attain. To reconcile your past wrongs and reach for forgiveness, to aspire to be bathed in grace… what else would you be?”

“A _person_?” Deirdre suggested. “A thinking creature? With, like, convictions and shit? Capable of understanding consequences and making sacrifices?” She realized that what she had described was functionally a human and let out a laugh that was more bitter than she’d thought it would be. “Let me make one thing absolutely clear,” she said. “No matter what they do to me down here--and I have a feeling that they’re just getting started--I won’t sell out. I won’t repent. I won’t recant. And I will never, ever, feel guilty for what I’ve done. I’ll just feel a whole lot of pain.”

Uriel’s eyes narrowed. No longer a comforting black, they were now a faint blue. It was disturbing to think of her father as having blue eyes, but blue eyes in general disturbed Deirdre. They looked like all the color had been drained out of them. It was unsettling. “You are a stubborn and intractable girl,” the angel said. “Stiff-necked and hard-hearted.”

“And you’re trying to airlift me out of my hard-earned punishment,” Deirdre said. “The fact that I am a grown woman aside… tell me, is the Lord of the Underworld fine with you snatching a soul who walked willingly through his gates?”

“The Almighty--”

“--Can suck my--”

“ _Enough_!”

There it was again, that horrible jittery lightning. Uriel stared at Deirdre with cold hard eyes as she shuddered, both unable to move and buzzing with energy. Finally it released her and she staggered over to the wall, gasping for air. For once the cool stone was a relief instead of a torment.

“Perhaps,” Uriel said, “I should take my leave now. I suppose I’ll see you again.” It bowed, still wearing her father’s face. As it began to shimmer out of existence, it added. “You’d do well to not let the Erinyes catch you. I can’t imagine they’d be tender.”

Deirdre gave the departing angel an obscene hand gesture to speed it on its way, accompanied with a mocking double of its deep bow.

And then, alone under the harsh light of judgment, she let herself cry. She curled up in on herself and buried her face in her hands, sinking to her knees. It wasn’t that she was crying for the lost opportunity, or so she told herself between heaving sobs. It was just that she hadn’t seen a human face in so long. She’d even welcome the traitor’s visage, provided he was flesh and blood.

She couldn’t cry for long, although it felt like an eternity. The soft sound of feet against stone drew her attention and, like a hunted deer, she was off. Her hair billowed behind her as she ran, terrified, away from her tormentors.

And yet…

The angel had proven something to her. It had reminded her that she had a soul. Not just the stuff that constituted her body here in the netherworld, but a core. Deep down inside, she was still human, and while that came with countless limitations, there was one advantage that her nature had.

There was something at the center of her, burning a quiet little fire that would never go out. It wasn’t her father holding her, it wasn’t the hot rush of blood coming from a slit throat, it wasn’t her mother’s delighted shriek as she left her human form behind. It was something simpler than that.

She’d been sitting on her mother’s lap, and her mother had been kissing her head as she braided her hair. Her touch was gentle but firm, her motions quick but no less loving for it. The faint scent of Moroccan oil hung lightly in the air, and her father’s hair, long then like it had been for so many centuries, shone with it. In her pudgy child’s hands Deirdre had been holding a pomegranate, the red arils like little rubies against the white flesh surrounding them. She’d been too weak and unskilled at the time to figure out how to pluck them without making a mess, but her father had known, and he was prying out individual jewels, holding them just out of her reach.

She could hear her mother’s voice. It was distant, but untouched by fear and anger and pain. _Nico, stop teasing her. She’s wriggling like a caught fish._

And her father, a laugh in his voice: _Can you hold still, neshama?_

She could and did, but she also stuck out her tongue. Tessa, giggling, pinched her waist. _My little lizard_ . It took an eternity but finally Nicodemus very gently placed the aril on her outstretched tongue. She crunched it happily, relishing the bittersweet juice, and he kissed her forehead. _Good girl_.

Perhaps she could live in that interminable moment, straining upward. Perhaps even if everything faded, that memory would paint these walls a color other than featureless white.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. This fanfic ultimately came out of the question “is it possible for me to write Deirdre as a developed character in her own right without her being redeemed or even redeemable?” but it has roots in basically every person I’ve chatted to in fandom being of the opinion that Deirdre is who she is because she was manipulated to be that way by her father, and that her status as a victim is what makes her deserving of sympathy. Which is their opinion that they are entitled to, just as I am entitled to my opinion that Deirdre Archleone is a stone-cold bitch with enough personal agency to drown a whale who made her godawful choices of her own free will, with open eyes and a sound mind.
> 
> 2\. I realized like a thousand words in that this is the same scenario as the one in “Jephthah’s Daughter” by HonorH. I’d like to say, deeply and sincerely, from the bottom of my heart… my bad. I really did not intend for that to be a thing. Uriel appears in this because he seemed a natural foil for Deirdre, and he appears there. I put a lot of what I thought was original thinking into the best-fitting Greek ironic punishment for Deirdre, and it turned out to mirror theirs. If you’re reading this and you disagree with me on the opinions that get upheld here, go read that, because my oh-shit-i-fucked-up reread revealed that HonorH and I took very different interpretations of the same situation.
> 
> 3\. I really like death fic, apparently, because this is the third death fic I’ve written and the second afterlife fic I’ve written. Maybe one day I’ll put everything on one account to see how my "writing" ""style"" has """"evolved"""".
> 
> 4\. Since there is discourse surrounding this in fandom circles, please take this note as your invitation to tell me that my fanfiction sucks in as much or as little detail as you like.


End file.
